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The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt for the latest installment of “How Bad Is It?,” a monthly series on the health of American democracy. Their guest is Roy Wood, Jr., the host of the satirical program “Have I Got News for You,” on CNN. The group discusses the significance of CBS’s cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” a recent episode of “South Park” that is searingly critical of Donald Trump, and the President’s deployment of lawsuits and the administrative state to try to intimidate his critics in the media and entertainment industries. “There’s always going to be these petty, ticky-tack battles that the Administration fights,” says Wood. “But I don’t think that’s gonna stop the comedians from doing what Trump hopes this would do, which is silence them.”

This week’s reading:

“ ‘South Park’ Skewers a Satire-Proof President,” by Tyler Foggatt

“What the Cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Means,” by Vinson Cunningham

“How the Israeli Right Explains the Aid Disaster It Created,” by Isaac Chotiner

“Should Police Officers Be More Like U.F.C. Fighters?,” by Sam Eagan

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

Even if Mozart’s name and a quote from Beaumarchais’s play “The Marriage of Figaro” didn’t feature in the credits of “The Rules of the Game,” this 1939 film by Jean Renoir would still be the closest thing to a Mozart opera—indeed, to his “Marriage of Figaro”—ever put on film. Like Mozart’s Beaumarchais adaptation, Renoir’s film portrays crisscrossing romantic entanglements both among and between high society and the hired help, the elaborate ruses deployed to conceal them, and the mayhem that results when the truth comes out. Like the opera, the film blends these disparate moods and tones at a whirlwind tempo: slapstick comedy and poignant melodrama, graceful lyricism and bumptious braggadocio, witty satire and bitter tragedy. (The movie, in a 2021 restoration, is enjoying a brief run at the Paris Theatre, in a series called “Punch Up: Uppercuts to the Upper Crust,” starting August 1st; it’s also streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

Yet calling “The Rules of the Game” Mozartean would be faint praise if Mozart’s opera weren’t understood in its full potency: “The Marriage of Figaro” (like “Don Giovanni”) is a fiercely indignant denunciation of the aristocracy’s predatory power, which is embodied in the crime of rape. Count Almaviva seeks to exercise droit du seigneur over his wife’s maidservant, Susanna, who is betrothed to his valet, Figaro. The couple joins forces to outwit the Count, whose ultimate exposure leads to a more general unmasking—of a regime of lies, of oppression both by class and gender (women of various statuses being harassed, betrayed, or duped), and of relationships warped by submission or resistance to unjust authority.

Likewise, in “The Rules of the Game,” Renoir boldly undertakes an often rollicking, always sly, yet passionately indignant vision of French society of its time, which he sees as rotting under the weight of a social order that’s designed to protect privilege of many sorts. Renoir’s film also hinges on sexualized violence, albeit differently from that in “Figaro.” Here the overlords do not wield violence themselves but quietly condone it for the sake of preserving the order on which their privilege rests. Which is to say that “The Rules of the Game,” released less than two months before the outbreak of the Second World War, is a vision of looming catastrophe, of authoritarian menace from within as well as from without, and of the diabolical complicity of France’s privileged classes, both aristocratic and bourgeois, in depravities committed in their name and their interest.

As with Mozart, Renoir’s overt effervescence offers a fanciful tour of a charming hell on earth—and tempts viewers with its seductions. The story, inspired by Alfred de Musset’s play “The Caprices of Marianne,” from 1833, is both intricate and simple, with clear but manifold relationships giving rise to complications through the overlapping conflicts of personal interests and social norms. To summarize it is to marvel both at the refinement of Renoir’s narrative juggling and at his conceptual audacity in catching the mighty storms of history in such romantic filigree. A famous young pilot, André Jurieux, is in love with a refined Austrian émigrée, Christine, who is married to an aristocrat named Robert de la Cheyniest. Robert has a mistress, a Parisian socialite named Geneviève, but ends the affair because he worries that he could lose Christine to André. He and Christine are hosting a weekend hunt, with attendant festivities, at their château, in the Loire Valley; a friend of theirs, a former musician named Octave, exhorts them to invite André, both to establish the innocence of Christine’s friendship with him and to cool the young man’s reckless ardor. Meanwhile, downstairs, another plot unfolds involving Christine’s maid, Lisette, who’s married to Robert’s gamekeeper, Schumacher. Robert impulsively hires a poacher named Marceau, who is Schumacher’s nemesis, as a domestic servant; once in the château, Marceau brazenly pursues Lisette, arousing Schumacher’s violent jealousy.

The political implications of the movie are inscribed in the film itself and in its notably checkered release history, which is painstakingly tracked by Pascal Mérigeau, in his fine biography of Renoir. Renoir made the movie—his twenty-second, and his thirteenth talkie—independently, with his own production company, and it was released on July 8, 1939, at a run time of ninety-eight minutes. This version is lost. Renoir, stung by bad reviews and poor box-office results, cut the film drastically while it was still in release, removing eighteen minutes from it; then the original negative was destroyed by Allied bombings during the Second World War. But in 1959, as a title card in the 2021 restoration mentions, Renoir participated in a reconstruction of the film from footage found in various places. This version, which is the one shown now, was very close to Renoir’s original, pre-release version, effectively a director’s cut, now running at a hundred and seven minutes. The title card for the 1959 version, still on view in the 2021 restoration, declares that, though the movie is “set on the eve of war,” its characters are nonetheless purely “imaginary.” Of course, Renoir only surmised the coming of war, unfortunately accurately. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and, two days later, France declared war on Germany.

Nonetheless, the politics of that bland-sounding 1959 statement about the movie’s character are jolting. Why would Renoir downplay the film’s relevance and perceptiveness? The answer is that France at this time was attempting to heal its wartime wounds, papering over the cracks in the social fabric that had opened up during the German Occupation and positioning itself as a nation of resisters, in which collaborators had been few and aberrant. One of the methods by which France did so was the censorship of movies. When Alain Resnais released his Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog,” in 1955, he was forced to obscure an image of a French gendarme guarding a concentration camp. “The Rules of the Game” doesn’t mention any political figures, but it alludes to the division underlying the Occupation and its depravities: antisemitism.

Robert is a marquis, inheritor of an ancient title of nobility, who nonetheless has German Jewish ancestry, something that attracts the attention of other characters. His own chauffeur haughtily refers to him as a métèque, a derogatory term for an immigrant, and his chef, noting that the subject of discussion is, specifically, Jews, praises the Marquis’s culinary refinement, says that he’s a gentleman “even though he’s a métèque.” What’s more, Renoir emphasizes Robert’s identity by casting the suave and ebullient Marcel Dalio, born in Paris as Israel Mosche Blauschild. (He was soon to win fame in Hollywood as the croupier in “Casablanca.”) The very antisemitism that Renoir underscores with the dialogue and the casting was partly responsible for the film’s commercial failure: right-wing viewers, aware of Renoir’s left-wing politics, came out to boo when Dalio was onscreen, and rightist critics sniped at the character, too. Meanwhile, the plot-pivoting rage of Schumacher—whose name Christine pronounces as if it were German—suggests a barbed allusion to the militaristic wolf at France’s door.

The manifest contentiousness of “The Rules of the Game” emerges in yet another twist of history noted by Mérigeau. The 1959 restoration was released in London in 1960, in New York in 1961, but in Paris only in . . . 1965. Renoir’s title-card disclaimer had not immediately reversed the film’s fortunes in France, but now its achievement finally began to be recognized, with the critic Jean de Baroncelli writing, in Le Monde, that “its revolutionary force is intact.” It’s a surprising but apt observation—because unlike such films as “Citizen Kane” and “Breathless,” what’s revolutionary about “The Rules of the Game” isn’t a matter of form but of politics. The movie’s startling originality is in its spirit, its insolent ironies. As for its form, that starts and stops with Renoir himself—because it’s shaped to fit not only a particular historical moment and a particular idea but also a particular realm of experience—namely, the director’s own. It’s revolutionary like “The Marriage of Figaro,” an opera that, properly heard, should leave a spectator wondering why its first audiences, in Vienna in 1786, didn’t beat the French by three years in overthrowing the aristocratic regime. Likewise, the 1965 release of “The Rules of the Game” must have left Baroncelli wondering why 1968 wasn’t already happening.

Although Renoir asserted that his characters were imaginary, he was very familiar with the world he was depicting. As a son of the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, had access to the French beau monde without being of it, and he’d seen its ugliness long before war loomed. He depicts his characters’ reckless frivolity, the mores that bind them together in a sort of conspiracy of falsehood and self-deception, with an almost documentary eye. The temptation of emphasizing the social critique and the political fury of “The Rules of the Game,” as of a Mozart opera, over its aesthetic is strong because its perfection almost annoyingly surpasses description. Perfection isn’t precision—what’s exact in “The Rules of the Game” isn’t technique but tone and mood. Whereas lesser works leave seams and gaps within which critics can tear and probe and find what they’re looking for, “Rules” simply is—so fully and completely itself that it seems to exist beyond criticism.

The characters’ traits are psychologically astute, sociologically resonant, and dramatically explosive, but it’s Renoir’s comprehensive artistry—the casting, the performances, the dialogue, and the dramaturgy—that make them seem like archetypes in a modern mythology. For starters, the movie’s story emerges in action with a wide range of styles that suggest a cinematic compendium to match its variety of human types. That striking range includes a meticulously observed attention to physical context. André’s landing at an airfield near Paris after a daring transatlantic flight has a documentary quality, combining the drama with a newsreel-like display of the making of the live radio broadcast about his heroic feat. And, famously, the hunting party at the center of the film involves the killing of real animals (hundreds of them, according to Mérigeau). The drama is often bracingly straightforward; characters declare their motives and enact their plans with brusque directness. There is also spectacular ornament and pageantry, alongside a tumultuous sense of rowdiness about to erupt—fisticuffs, slapstick chases, and daring combinations of hapless antics and true danger. Cleverly developed scenes of suspense clash against sinuous ones that evoke intricate schemes and deep-rooted traditions, which Renoir emphasizes visually by making foregrounds and backgrounds converge. Elsewhere, he flaunts a graphic near-abstraction that catches horror with detachment, as when André drives his car off the road in what Octave calls a suicide attempt.

“The Rules of the Game” exuberantly overflows with some of the most sharply aphoristic dialogue in the history of cinema, as exemplified by one of its widely quoted epigrams: “The awful thing in this life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Under Renoir’s direction, the cast speak their lines nearly musically, with theatrically expressive inflections, while also conjuring a high-wire sense of spontaneity. The actors are kept invigoratingly busy but also have the kind of presence that can fill the screen en passant, in gestures and glances delivered with the lyrical power.

That celebrated epigram is delivered by the character of Octave, who is the greatest creation of Renoir’s career—not least because he’s played by Renoir in a performance that’s essentially a self-portrait, even an onscreen self-creation. Octave is a failed conductor—his musical name is borrowed directly from “The Caprices of Marianne”— who studied with Christine’s father, a famous conductor, and idolized him. Octave now lives as a social parasite, flitting about among his friends and living off their generosity. (In Renoir’s original script, Octave is a critic, but the film offers no trace of any such career.) As the universal go-between, Octave is a supreme observer and, more than that, a stage manager of everyone’s business, whose own passions remain silent and unsuspected by everyone whose business he maneuvers. Renoir plays Octave with a high-relief ebullience to match that of his professional cast of actors while raising his self-depiction to a portrayal of the cinema itself.

Octave is the supreme director, the decisive agent of actions taken by others, and he puts the plot into motion with an offhandedness that conceals a self-critical, even guilt-ridden sense of responsibility gravely lacking among his circle of friends. Yet he’s also a director by default, a socialite—albeit marginally and tenuously—only because he couldn’t hack it in the classic arts. Movies are the prime compensatory art, in which machinery, technology, a throng of cast and crew do the bulk of the work, enabling the director, through them, to realize a sensibility that would otherwise find no practical outlet. As Renoir’s son, Jean knew the classical arts firsthand (at one point, he was to have been a ceramicist), and though he lacked his father’s traditional kind of talent, he distinguished himself by his comparative modernity.

The director’s decade of films prior to “Rules” is one of the miracles of cinematic inspiration. Yet its other entries, such as “La Chienne,” “Boudu Saved from Drowning,” “The Crime of Monsieur Lange,” and “La Grande Illusion,” are all easier to discuss, because, for all their sharp-eyed observations and scathing insights, their humane warmth and artistic invention, they’re about what they’re about, pointedly and pugnaciously and plainly. By contrast, “The Rules of the Game” is a feature-length symbol: it incarnates dramatic relationships with hyperreal clarity while also conjuring a world in crisis that is beyond the ken of the oblivious characters and yet erupting in their very midst. And Renoir does more than unmask the failings of his circles and his times: with the character of Octave, he shows himself witnessing them, with self-deprecating antics that disguise but don’t conceal his fury. With this character and this performance, Renoir virtually assured the movie’s failure in its own time while assuring its place in the future. ♦

In its nearly sixteen years on the air, “WTF with Marc Maron” has recorded more than fifteen hundred episodes, with guests ranging from RuPaul to Robin Williams to Barack Obama. In 2015, Maron interviewed the Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, who had long ago turned Maron down for a job. As Sarah Larson noted, what might have seemed a loss was really a gain, allowing Maron to arrive at “the right thing at the right time”—that is, becoming “an unhinged garage-podcast messiah.” This fall, “WTF” will end its run, after which Maron plans to spend more time acting and doing standup. (His new special, “Panicked,” arrives on HBO this week.) Not long ago, he joined us to recommend a few books about particular interests of his that he has recently enjoyed. “I wouldn’t say I’m an avid reader, and when I read, I mean business,” he said. “If I’m going to read a book, it better do its job.” His remarks have been edited and condensed.

No One Left to Come Looking for You

by Sam Lipsyte

This novel is about young people who are living through a moment of transition, when both the Lower East Side and the music associated with it are becoming gentrified. These are people who think “sellout” means something, and that some stuff is really garbage because of its mass appeal.

The plot is a pulpy detective story that revolves around this kid named Jack Shit, who’s in a noise-rock punk outfit, and who has lost his bass and his drug-addicted lead singer. He needs to find them because they have a gig in a few days. He’s singularly focussed on that, but in the course of his search Jack learns that there are bigger forces at hand—that it’s not all about him, and that not only is music slipping away from what he believes it should be, but that New York City is also about to be turned inside out by real-estate developers.

I have to be transparent—Sam is one of my best friends. But I have read him forever, and I think he’s one of the great humorists of our time. The book has a beautiful ending that takes place in an ice rink, where Jack has to go up against a hired goon who is also a great skater. I think the requirement of a story of any kind is that your lead character should probably change. At the end of this, everything around Jack has changed, but he remains, and it’s kind of touching.

Sonny Boy

by Al Pacino

Reading Pacino’s whole story was fascinating. It shows you how much he was really invested in acting from the start because of the art. You read about his influences, his beginnings as part of this kind of fringe, radical theater company—where he and Martin Sheen would be in the back sweeping up—and about the fact that what compelled him was the pursuit of truth. I know people talk about “truth” in acting all the time, but acting can be a lot of things. You can just get away with it. A lot of actors are just hustlers, they’re conmen riding on natural gifts. But he was in it, all in.

Another thing I came away with is that, with a public person like this, you judge them by their performances. Al Pacino’s always got these roles where he has a lot of swagger, but it turns out that he’s pretty shy. I didn’t know that he is this vulnerable, sensitive, neurotic artist. And he’s very honest about having to do roles for money, because he was such a nutty guy that he just couldn’t manage money at all. It was just kind of amazing to me to know that guy, the real Al Pacino, and to learn a bit about his process.

The Crisis of Culture

by Olivier Roy

Yeah, this one, geez. It’s not an easy read. I’ve always been a guy who wants to take on these books—whatever trend cultural criticism is leaning toward, I try to crack it. I’m not that intellectual, I do not have the foundations to really wrap my brain around some of the language of this stuff, but I like to look toward books like these to feed my own perception of what I see going on.

The biggest thing I took is Roy’s idea that society is breaking apart and that we are losing a shared cultural understanding—that, especially as we moved into a world ruled more by social media, we lost the ability to have a civic body. He has some really interesting stuff to say about how neoliberalism flows into the structure of digital platforms, and how that has all kinds of questionable effects, like making what people stand for meaningless in a certain way.

The book really made me think about the effects of creativity being made available, for many people, only through social-media platforms, which are corporate entities designed and built to capture eyeballs and make money and advertise—to dump things into people’s brains. It’s especially interesting to me in terms of the comedy industry. You know, I have this idea that as a comic you have freedom of speech, freedom of voice. But if your career is tethered to a one-minute clip, and to algorithms dictating what should and shouldn’t be put in front of people—an algorithm that is also chipping away at people’s attention spans—what happens then? If you’re operating in that world, which is not the real world, then maybe you don’t have any real freedom.

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Last week, in a piece for the Guardian, Nick Maynard, a volunteer surgeon at a hospital in southern Gaza, wrote, “I’ve just finished operating on another severely malnourished young teenager. A seven-month-old baby lies in our paediatric intensive care unit, so tiny and malnourished that I initially mistook her for a newborn. The phrase ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do justice to the way her body has been ravaged. She is literally wasting away before our eyes and, despite our best efforts, we are powerless to save her.” The humanitarian situation in Gaza, which was already dire, deteriorated even further in July, with sixty-three people, including twenty-five children, dying from malnutrition-related causes, according to the World Health Organization. This past weekend, Israel announced that it would pause some military activity in the territory and allow more aid in, although it remains unclear how long that pause will last.

As more reports and images of emaciated children emerge from Gaza, close Israeli allies, such as France and the United Kingdom, have issued harsh critiques, calling the current humanitarian situation a “catastrophe.” Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, announced that his country would become the first member of the G-7 to recognize a Palestinian state, and Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has also promised to do so unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire. On Monday, even President Trump acknowledged that children were going hungry. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has continued to insist that there is “no starvation in Gaza.”) Two Israeli human-rights groups have begun referring to Israel’s actions as “genocide.” The scale of the crisis has also caused a number of American politicians and commentators, including defenders of the war, to argue that more aid needs to be allowed into the territory, or that the war itself has become unjust.

Amit Segal, the chief political correspondent for Israel’s Channel 12, is widely considered one of the country’s most influential journalists. Segal is a prominent defender of the Netanyahu government. He has written on topics such as what he calls “The Settler Violence Scam” and the need to annex parts of Gaza. Last week, he wrote a piece for the Free Press in which he said that “Gaza may well be approaching a real hunger crisis.” He approvingly quoted the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who said, “It’s hard to convince Israelis of that because literally everything said to them for 22 months on this topic has been a fiction.” He also wrote that without Hamas’s “gleeful hoarding of food,” Gaza “would not be facing the current food shortage.” (The following day, Reuters reported that an analysis conducted by U.S.A.I.D. found “no evidence of systematic theft” of U.S. humanitarian supplies by Hamas. Another report, in the Times, said that Israeli officials privately agree that Hamas has not systemically looted United Nations aid, directly contradicting a central talking point of the Israeli war effort.)

I recently spoke by phone with Segal. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his wavering opinion on whether there is hunger in Gaza, his support for Trump’s plan to develop Gaza without Palestinians, and just how much power the extreme right has over the Israeli government.

For Americans who might not know your work, you’re often talked about as someone who’s very familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking. Are you in touch with—

Yeah, that’s correct. I’m not the mouthpiece of Netanyahu. I’m a right-winger, but not more than this. I speak only for myself.

I just meant that people say that you understand his thinking and have good sources in the government.

I wouldn’t deny it. Yes.

So tell me what caused you to write this piece for the Free Press saying that there was grave concern about the food situation in Gaza.

So, first of all, I don’t think there is hunger in Gaza. I want to put that first and foremost.

You do not think there is hunger in Gaza?

I don’t think that the hunger campaign that Hamas runs in the international media is anything remotely connected to the truth. However, I do think there is a situation that can actually deteriorate to something like this. For the past twenty-two months, Hamas has been running a hunger campaign in Gaza. Israelis and maybe some Americans are wary of these accusations because they know it’s propaganda. The fact that there is a developing crisis does not emanate from Israeli decisions, but from a cynical game played by Hamas and the United Nations. However, Israel will be blamed for it. That’s why I want Israel to be wise and not only to be just.

Just to be clear, your article does talk about a “hunger crisis” in Gaza.

Developing. Developing. [The piece is titled “The Price of Flour Shows the Hunger Crisis in Gaza.”]

There are reports of starvation deaths in Gaza. Are you denying those?

I doubt ninety per cent of it. I can’t tell you that it doesn’t exist in specific places or specific people, but I don’t think that the numbers Hamas and the international media quote are the numbers.

One of the things your piece says is that, essentially for the entire duration of the war, there’ve been false warnings about a hunger crisis. Why do you think the warnings were false previously?

Hamas tried to depict a picture that did not exist. There was no hunger in Gaza. For years, Hamas has claimed that Gaza is starving. Hamas always used this weapon of alleged hunger in order to get more humanitarian aid. [A U.N. study from 2022, prior to the war, found that more than three-quarters of Palestinian families reduced the number of meals they consumed because of a lack of food.]

The Times reported that “at least 20 Palestinian children had died from malnutrition and dehydration.” So we’re not denying that people have died, right?

No, we do not deny that people died. We just are not sure that people died from dehydration or starvation.

That report I just quoted was from March of 2024.

I see. I beg to differ with the New York Times because the New York Times bases its reports on Hamas sources. The New York Times relies heavily on stringers in Gaza that have two options: either report what Hamas wants or die, and I blame the New York Times for this. The head of the legal department of the New York Times told me, How can you blame us for writing what Hamas wants? Our journalists died because in the past they reported things that Hamas didn’t like.

This person told you this on the record?

They wanted to sue me when I claimed that they relied on stringers who collaborated with Hamas.

So they told you this privately?

Yeah. You can quote it. [David McCraw, the lead newsroom lawyer at the Times, was identified to me later by Segal as the person who allegedly said this. McCraw told The New Yorker, “I never said any of that. We never threatened to sue him. And our journalists have not been killed by Hamas.” In 2023, McCraw asked Segal to make corrections to some statements he had made on social media, including that the Times employed “ISIS-embedded stringers.”] So even if we take into account the fact that twenty children died of dehydration, which I doubt and which the I.D.F. doubts, there is no way to double-check it. [In the past several days, a number of news organizations have called on Israel to allow international reporters to enter Gaza, something that it has thus far largely restricted them from doing.] What can make hunger in Gaza is the unholy coalition between the U.N. and Hamas. Each and every organization in Gaza has to pay at least fifteen to twenty per cent of the humanitarian aid directly to the pockets of Hamas.

I assume you don’t believe the Times’ recent reporting that, in fact, Hamas has not systematically stolen U.N. aid, despite what Israeli officials have been saying.

I invite you to read my report today. It is on on X. It shows how false this report is.

The U.N. and Hamas are not on a campaign to feed Gaza. They are on a campaign to stop the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (G.H.F.) from the distribution of food to Gaza. Why is that? Because they want a monopoly.

The G.H.F. is the private nonprofit set up with American and Israeli backing to deliver food.

Let’s admit it, it’s an Israeli-American creature that is focussed on feeding Gazans.

Well, the Israelis have said they’re not funding it. Are you saying that they are?

I don’t know if there is direct funding, but Israel is the organizer of the G.H.F.

There has been a lot of time spent denying that.

Israel is behind this foundation, but the idea is noble and it is to keep humanitarian aid from becoming a weapon for the survival of Hamas. Now, here’s the question to you: Why is the U.N. obsessed with the G.H.F.?

The hundreds of people who have been killed at G.H.F. sites?

No. This is what Hamas claims and what the New York Times quotes. By the way, the vast majority of people killed in the G.H.F. were killed by Hamas. Hamas tried to kill and shoot people who came to take food from G.H.F. because the purpose is to save Hamas’s regime. [The vast majority of the deaths at or near G.H.F. sites have been attributed to the I.D.F.; Haaretz reported last month that the Army was deliberately firing at Palestinians seeking aid.] By the way, I’m not the only one to understand this. President Biden, in October of 2023, actually forced Israel to provide humanitarian aid, right? And then he said, and I quote, “If Hamas diverts or steals the assistance, they will have demonstrated once again that they have no concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people, and it will end. As a practical matter, it will—it will stop the international community from being able to provide this aid.”

For a long time, people have been saying that there’s going to be mass starvation in Gaza. Even Netanyahu, a few months ago, warned about reaching “a point of starvation” after there’d been a complete shutoff of aid into the territory. Subsequently, more aid was allowed in. You are saying all these warnings were essentially not correct?

I say that Gaza is not the United States or Israel or Albania, in which the regime takes care of the wellness of its people.

But you’re aware there was a complete cutoff of aid for months, right?

There was a cutoff from March to May. But here’s the question: If the cutoff was between March and May, how come the hunger and starvation began in July? [Multiple aid experts told The New Yorker that the worst starvation would arrive some time after a total aid cutoff. As Arif Husain, of the World Food Programme, told The New Yorker, “It is a delayed effect. Households and markets will have some stocks which then run out if no further supplies arrive.”]

And the answer is because Hamas steals the U.N. humanitarian aid in order to sell it or to store it and to sell it later. [The New York Times reported last week that the “Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter. In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.”] So the problem was fully created by Hamas, not by an Israeli decision to genocide Gaza. Israel is the only country on earth that provides humanitarian aid to the enemy in the middle of a war. It’s the only country on earth. There isn’t a single country that ever did it.

The question is whether Israel will allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. They weren’t paying for the U.N. aid. Many countries allow foreign aid to enter war zones.

The only one interested in feeding Gazans these days is the G.H.F.

There have been some right-wing ministers in the government, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who’ve made comments about how aid should not be allowed into Gaza. I assume you’re going to say that’s not the official policy of the government, correct?

Right, exactly.

O.K., but do Smotrich and Ben-Gvir want the genocide you said wasn’t going on? It’s a little confusing to have people in the government essentially saying out loud what people are accusing Israel of doing.

This is the nature of the parliamentary regime of a multi-party coalition. Just to put things straight: Smotrich didn’t say that humanitarian aid should not enter. He said that it should be done through the G.H.F. [At multiple points during the war, Smotrich has blocked or spoken out against aid entering Gaza, and, in 2024, stated, “No one in the world will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages.”]

Ben-Gvir actually did say this, along with many other stupid things. In the first months of the war, there was a consensus in Israel. Yair Golan, the center-left politician, said, on the fourth day of the war, that we should not allow humanitarian aid into Gaza until the hostages are back. So it was a consensus. If you look at the indictments in The Hague against Israel, you would see many quotes, and many of them belong to the center-left.

This is what’s confusing. If no aid should be let in, then people are going to starve. And you’re saying that’s a consensus in Israel, but you’re also saying Israel’s not going to starve anyone.

No, no, because it’s two different things. First of all, there is a difference between a war that lasts, I dunno, a few weeks and one that lasts two years. And, second, it’s theoretical because, when President Biden arrived in Israel, in the second week of the war, there was a decision made by the Israeli cabinet that humanitarian aid would enter Gaza.

Israel cut off aid completely, as we talked about, for over two months, between March and May, and after that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was set up, and it was set up in part because Netanyahu didn’t want to be seen as allowing aid into Gaza. That’s why it was given this American imprimatur, because he didn’t want to piss off the far right, which doesn’t want aid to enter.

No, not at all. This was a Smotrich initiative.

So why is Israel denying they are behind it?

I guess because it would not help Gazans if the food had an Israeli flag on it.

O.K., go on, that seems—

There are rumors that Israel is funding the G.H.F. I haven’t seen proof so far. But Israel is behind it. But I have to ask you something. You spoke about twenty children who died a year ago in Gaza from dehydration. If it happened, it’s a tragedy. I don’t think there is anyone who wants to see babies and children die.

Maybe people in the Israeli cabinet, but beyond that.

There isn’t a single Israeli minister that wants to see babies die. You know how I know it? Because Israel has a nuclear weapon. If Israel really wanted to have a genocide, it would’ve done it already. I know it’s a waste of time to speak to a liberal news outlet in the United States about the numbers. You won’t find a single initiative by an Israeli cabinet minister that wants to kill babies on purpose.

You know about Ben-Gvir and the wedding.

Which one?

Where there was dancing.

Which one?

Pretending to stab Palestinians.

It was a disgusting event in which someone stabbed the picture of a baby. And it was disgusting. [In 2015, at a wedding that Ben-Gvir attended, dancing guests held up a photograph of a Palestinian baby who had been burned to death by right-wing Israeli extremists several months earlier, and one guest stabbed the picture with a knife. Ben-Gvir was the lead arsonist’s attorney. He later called the display at the wedding “stupidity.”] And there were indictments because Israel is a law-and-order state. Ben-Gvir didn’t do it. Maybe he participated. I wouldn’t have taken part in an event like this.

That’s good to know.

O.K., there are seven very big reports in The New Yorker about the so-called starvation in Gaza. But there are zero reports about a genocidal event, the massacre of Druze in Syria over the last few weeks, and zero reports about seven million [displaced persons] in Congo. I just want to offer the idea that the West is preoccupied with the state of Israel murdering and genociding Gazans and Palestinians even when there is no proof.

You just said “so-called starvation.” In your own piece, you quote someone saying “mass starvation seems inevitable” without a change of strategy. But it’s a little confusing because, if Hamas decides who eats, then why is Israel changing its policy? If Hamas has all the food, it can do whatever it wants. Why has there been panic in official Israeli circles that things are getting out of hand?

Hamas does it, but the world blames Israel for it.

But why will a policy change by Israel matter if Hamas is controlling everything?

Because once you flood the area with food, you actually prevent this argument from being heard. There is footage today from the markets in Central Gaza in which there is plenty of bread and flour and food and each and every kind of commodity. [When I followed up to ask what footage he was referring to, he sent me a clip that he said was from the Abu Ali Express, which Haaretz has called a “news channel for psyops.” The video appears to show two young men in a room containing some food supplies putting small snack packages in a bag.]

In 2021, Ben-Gvir tweeted a photo of the two of you together and said that you signed a personal dedication for him in the book you had written. What was it?

I don’t really remember. I sold eighty thousand copies of the book. You can take the fact that he bought a book and asked me for a signature in the Knesset as evidence that I’m his best buddy. But, if you want to make a good journalist, no, no, no. I think he’s a clown. I think I defined one of his Knesset members as a terror supporter.

Let’s take a step back. As you see it, what is the long-term goal of the war at this point?

The long-term goal of the war is to dismantle Hamas in Gaza, both militarily and as a regime.

The Times Magazine had a big piece a few weeks ago, basically saying that this war has been continuing for political reasons for well over a year, and that Netanyahu essentially knew that there was nothing left to accomplish militarily a year ago. And one thing that’s strange to me is that so much of the debate, both in America and Israel, includes these impassioned arguments about the purpose of the war. But the article, and much other reporting about Netanyahu, has made me think it’s not even clear he believes he can truly dismantle Hamas. What do you make of that dissonance?

The smartest thing for a politician to do, especially Netanyahu, is to win this war as fast and as decisively as possible. It’s very unpopular to have an ongoing war. When Netanyahu defeated Iran in twelve days, he enjoyed huge support. There is no logic behind the argument that Netanyahu wants to prolong the war. I read the New York Times story, by the way. I talked to one of the reporters who wrote it. He didn’t quote me, in the end.

Now the question is: Is there an alternative for a faster end to the war? And there is one: that Israel withdraw to the original borders, thus leaving Hamas free to re-arm itself. We’d exchange all the hostages for every single terrorist and murderer who is imprisoned in Israel, including those who committed the October 7th massacre. In my opinion, and in Netanyahu’s opinion and in the opinion of many, many Israelis, this would necessarily lead to yet another October 7th. Because, if you let Hamas stay as a power in the Middle East after doing those horrible things, it would pave the way for another event. Even the leaders of the opposition, most of them, when you ask them whether they would end the war and have the same borders, say no.

So this is why you support moving all Gazans from Gaza?

No, I don’t support moving all Gazans from Gaza.

You commented on Trump’s proposal to remove Gazans from Gaza that “there is no way in the world that we could have hoped for something better.”

But Trump did not offer deportation. He offered emigration. The fact now is that Gazans are not allowed to leave Gaza. Egypt blocks the road. All I want to do is to let Gazans be like Isaac or Amit and to live wherever they want. If it’s Gaza, so be it. If it’s another country, so be it.

Trump said they would not be permitted to return to Gaza.

First of all, I’m not a spokesperson for Trump.

You said you could not have hoped for something better.

I support the idea of letting Gazans emigrate. ♦